“We just leave them and go? It seems unfair.”
It was unfair, but there were ways to make it fairer. “He had his warning.” And she had her sparker.
Josune pushed the trolley experimentally. It was almost at limit, for it hovered only millimeters above the floor. Snow helped her push it into the nearest room with a door with a manual override on the lock; she locked the door manually. They didn’t want it coming open when the systems failed. Just in case everyone got sucked out before the breach doors closed.
Back in the shuttle bay Josune looked around for the nearest power board. Ship circuits were all linked. She knew her smile was feral as she aimed her sparker at the nearest electrical panel. “Be ready to close that door.”
The panel sparked and smoked. She didn’t stop firing until it exploded in a cacophony of lightning flashes and bangs. Josune ran for Another Road as the flashes and bangs continued in a chain reaction throughout the Justice Department ship.
Snow shut the outer airlock as soon as she slid past.
Josune channeled her best Brand. “Oops. I think the ship will need a few repairs before it is serviceable again.”
“So sad,” Snow agreed, without a trace of regret. “A pity it wasn’t the Boost.”
“There are four hundred people on the Boost. I’m glad it wasn’t. Besides, Norris would be more used to action than this lot. These people rely on their name to intimidate. They don’t expect people to fight back.”
Carlos hit close on the breach door of Another Road as soon as they were through. “Good to see you still have that thing, but please don’t use it on our ship.”
“Not likely.” Josune laughed. “Roystan?”
“Are you all on board?”
“Yes, but—”
“I saw. Well done. I’m tempted to blow them to bits. Instead I’ll set an emergency beacon for them. A signal will get out eventually. It will bring every space scavenger in range to their door, but that’s their problem. Come on up so I can see you are all safe. Then we can get out of here.” He sounded breathless.
In the background, Josune heard Nika yell, “Jacques, where’s that damn garfungi?” She ran. Another Road unlinked and broke away. She reached the crew room just as they nullspaced.
Roystan smiled over at her. “Nice job.”
Jacques trotted out of the kitchen, a steaming bowl in his hands.
“Thanks.” Roystan’s hands shook as he took it. He dropped the bowl. Josune caught him as he slumped unconscious.
4
ALISTAIR LAUGHTON
The parcel from Zell—half a galaxy away—had taken one month and five ships to arrive.
Alistair looked down at the note Melda had scrawled. Handmade paper, handmade ink.
Prison life isn’t so bad. We get to trade with the warders.
It wasn’t a prison, not officially, but Alistair knew as well as Melda did that if the colonists tried to leave, or to send out an unsupervised message via the link, they’d be stopped. Maybe even meet with a little accident.
Fresh food. Medical attention. Mayeso cut her hand the other day. She was in a genemod machine, and out again in another hour.
Before the Santiagans had arrived with their machine and their doctor, a cut like that would have taken weeks to heal.
Don’t stress on our behalf. While you’re busy hunting modders, we’re living the good life.
How long would that continue if Alistair didn’t deliver?
He handed the note to Cam, who was kneeling in front of the low table on which the contents of the parcel were strewn.
Cam shook his head. “I read it already.”
The setting sun struck the gifts, bathing them in a red-gold light, bathing Cam’s face, so that for one unsettling moment Alistair thought he was sitting across from a bronzed statue. He glanced away, out the window that made up the two corner walls. Anything truly bronze nowadays had blue tones for him.
Unless it had been warmed by the sun.
His changed eyesight hadn’t been this disconcerting on Zell, where he’d had nothing to compare it with, but he’d lived his entire adult life in Dartigan Capitol. Coming back to the same scene, but seeing it so differently, was hard to take. Alistair closed his eyes and forced his thoughts away from the strangeness and onto his immediate problem.
One month, and still no sign of Nika Rik Terri. “How can someone just disappear?”
“She’s a modder, Alistair. But we’ll find her. We’ll keep looking until we do.”
They would find her, but would it be too late to save the colony?
He moved over to the window. Below, in the city of Dartigan Capitol, it was raining. Here above the clouds the sky was clear. That same sun colored the heavy rain clouds below a darker gold, creating outside the window a fluffy carpet that seemed to extend forever.
“Santiago knows we’re looking. They’ll wait.” Cam held up a pair of felted boots. “I swear, Yakusha’s designs get worse every time.”
“I like them,” Alistair said. To him, they were green and deep crimson, with a smattering of yellow. Then, because it was Cam and he could ask: “What color do you see them as?”
“Bright green and pink.” Cam tossed them over with a shudder. “They are loud.” He picked up a carved wristband. “Who do you think they meant this for?”
Some things, like the boots, were obvious. Cam had never worn felted boots in his life—and Yakusha would have had to make them four sizes smaller—while Alistair would never consider the painting of the lake his. He didn’t collect paintings.
“Do I look like I’d wear a bracelet?”
“You wear those boots.”
Alistair pulled his new boots on. “They’re comfortable.”
The entry link buzzed.
Alistair brought up the image of his guest. His former boss, Paola Teke. It was the first time anyone from his former life—before Zell—had come visiting. What did she want with him?
He opened the link. “Paola. This is a surprise.”
Paola was immaculate in a modern-cut purple silk suit. Purple to him, anyway. She must have come straight from work. She pushed against the lobby door. Paola didn’t like heights. Being out on the roof of a building 214 floors high was bound to worry her.
“Let me in.” Paola pushed at the door again. “The wind up here is about to blow me away.”
The lift lobby was on the roof. The car had let her off in a section screened from the wind, but it could be disconcerting for the first-timer. Especially if your aircar didn’t have good stabilizers.
“And I swear I can feel the building sway.”
That was because she knew the building was built to allow a sway of three meters, not because she could feel it. There were stabilizers built into each floor—and on the roof where Paola currently stood—that prevented you feeling the sway. Paola didn’t care. She’d gone through the specs and warned Alistair against buying the unit.
That had been three years ago, when it was still just an image on an architect’s computer.
Alistair wished she’d spent less time worrying about the physical structure and more about the solvency of the company he’d bought his unit from. The company had gone broke two days after Alistair had moved in. Which was why his ex-wife had left it to him in the divorce settlement.
Three years later the lawyers were still arguing over who was responsible for the bankruptcy, which was why, when Alistair had returned from Zell after a two-year absence, he discovered he remained the sole resident.
Not that he minded the quiet. There were advantages to living in an empty building.
“Just look at the services,” Paola had said at the time. “There’s a hundred pool cars for two hundred and fourteen floors, with four units on each. When you need an aircar, you’ll have to wait hours. Or call an aircab.”
Right now Alistair enjoyed being the only client in the building. When he called a car, it came immediately. Not to mention, with the divorce, his time on Zell, and now the hunt for Rik Terri, he didn’t have enough money to move anyway.
He buzzed to let Paola in.
“Thank God. I don’t know why you live here, Alistair.”
“My old boss,” he told Cam.
“From the Justice Department?”
“Yes.”
Paola stopped in the passage and stared at the long wall hangings that ran along it.
Alistair sighed. “I’d best go and rescue her.” He stood up and padded down to the front door.
“You like my wall hangings?”
He could see Paola struggle with a lie. “They’re—”
Alistair hid his smile but decided not to leave her floundering for a compliment she didn’t mean. “Some people find them loud.” Mostly pinks and browns, if you believed Cam. A discordant cacophony of color that hurt one’s eyes.
She nodded, vehemently.
“I find them restful.” In his eyes, at least, they were a riot of verdant greens, blues, and crimsons that offset the sterile cream of the walls. “Come on down.”
Paola started after him. Stopped. He turned. She was staring at him.
“What?”
“Those boots. My God, Alistair, you’ve really let yourself go. You used to be such a—” She shook her head.
“Handsome man,” Cam suggested from the door of the study.
“He was never—” Paola bit that off too.
“Whatever you say next you’re going to put your foot in it,” Cam said.
Paola stared at Cam. That, Alistair had found, was most people’s initial reaction to Cam. And their second. And their third.
“Who are you?”
Cam smiled and held out a hand. “Cam Le-Nguyen.”
Paola smiled back.
That was the usual reaction you got with Cam too. When Cam smiled, people smiled back.
“I’m a friend of Alistair’s.”
“Delighted to meet you, Cam.” She glanced sideways down at Alistair’s boots. “Maybe you could give him tips on how to dress. Take him to your tailor.”
“I couldn’t afford his tailor,” Alistair said. “Do you know how much his clothes cost?”
He was sure Cam had money. Why he’d even been on Zell was a mystery.
“Probably better than you do, Alistair.”
Cam looked at Paola with interest. “You’re a friend of Alistair’s.”
Alistair’s pre-Zell past was over with. “I used to work for her,” he said. “What do you want, Paola?”
“I just want to chat.”
Paola never made idle chat.
Cam, who knew what was in Alistair’s liquor cabinet better than Alistair did, held up a bottle inquiringly.
“Yes, please,” Paola said. “I’ve had a harrowing day.” She sank into one of the lounge chairs. “The Honesty League.” She shuddered. “They weren’t key players when you left, were they, Alistair?”
When he’d left. That was a polite way of putting it, even for Paola. “No.” But they’d received vids, even on Zell. “The Chester case?”
Jack Chester was a miner who’d made a living buying up the rights to abandoned asteroids. Except, one asteroid supposedly mined out wasn’t, and he hit a lode of gold and platinum—along with a small amount of transurides. The company who’d staked the original claim had muscled in and taken over, murdering Jack Chester in the process.
Except Jack suspected he might be murdered and had set up cameras, and he’d transmitted the whole thing to his brother, who just happened to own the largest non-company media network in the galaxy.
Despite the fact that the murderers were caught on tape, that their faces were displayed around the galaxy, and that one of the them was easily identifiable as a midlevel executive from Santiago, the executive had never been arrested.
“The public’s been on our back ever since, and they’re watching us closely. Justice Department’s had to clean up its act.”
“About time,” Alistair said. “Although, it’s only been, what, two months? It might die down soon.”
“No sign of that happening. You wouldn’t believe the extra work it’s given us. The Honesty League’s onto anything and everything.” Paola stared broodingly into the glass Cam brought over to her. “Like this latest case.” She drank a mouthful, sighed with pleasure. “It’s even aged.”
That’s because it had been sitting in Alistair’s liquor cabinet for the two years he’d been on Zell.
“This latest case?” Alistair prompted. Paola didn’t visit for no reason.
“Landed in my lap today, and the Honesty League knew about it before I did, can you believe. They were onto me before I even got into my office. Is it true? A Justice Department ship? Taking bribes?”
“That’s hardly unusual.”
“Were they taking bribes?” Cam asked.
“I wish. No, they ran a profitable sideline using their powers as Justice Department authority to board other ships and hold them there until whoever’d paid them to do the holding came to collect. Cattle ships mostly. Inside the legal zone too.” She took another appreciative mouthful. “They got unlucky. Someone fought back and left them all unconscious on their own ship. We had to decode the backup memory to see what had happened.”
Criminals cleaned their primary ship memory, but most of them forgot about backup memory. Alistair had pioneered using evidence from backup memory in Justice Department cases.
“We had to arrest them all,” Paola said. “We’ll take them to court and charge them. Keep this blasted Honesty League happy for now. But that’s not what I came here to talk about.”
Paola opened a link on Alistair’s big wall-screen. She hesitated, looked at Cam. “This is confidential.”
“I don’t work for the Justice Department any longer,” Alistair said. “And we’re in my apartment.”
“It’s okay,” Cam said. “I’ll get dinner.” He went down to the kitchen.
Paola watched him go, waited for the sound of the door, which didn’t come. “Where did he go?”
“Kitchen.”
“You mean he’s preparing it himself?”
He wasn’t. He’d brought it with him from a high-class restaurant near Cam’s apartment. The food was in the warmer, waiting till they’d finished with the parcel from Zell.
“My God, Alistair. What sort of place is Zell?”
“It wasn’t as if you could go out and order food in, Paola. There were fifty of us colonists.”
“I know, but—” Paola rested her head in her hands. “You should have stayed, Alistair. You weren’t sacked; you were asked to take leave.”
It was close enough to being sacked. Besides, he hadn’t wanted to work for the Justice Department after the farce of Lisbet’s trial.
He heard, rather than saw, when Cam came out of the kitchen and padded back up the passage. He paused where Alistair could see him, but not Paola.
Cam had his back.
“Show me what you were going to show me, Paola.”
Paola brought up the image again. “Executive Shanna Brown, from Brown Combine. She’s dead. Been dead for six months. She was murdered at a party.” The image changed. Security camera footage from inside a house. Judging by the way the view changed from camera to camera, the security was strong. The image stopped on another woman, who paused in the doorway.
Alistair’s trained brain automatically took in the statistics. Medium height, black eyes—no one had black eyes for real, she had to be modded—pearlescent skin that appeared to glow slightly. Where had he seen a look like that before? Her hair was spiked, black underneath with white tips.
It was a striking look. She was beautiful, in
a unique and compelling way.
“The man with her is Samson Sa, Brown’s body modder. He was invited to the party. This woman wasn’t.”
“Who is she?”
“I’ll get to that. Watch.”
Alistair watched as the woman circled the partygoers. Always with her gaze on Brown. Given that Shanna Brown was dead, and that Paola was here showing him this video, he guessed what would happen.
“Why did she want Brown dead?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Paola waved him silent. “Here it comes.”
The woman moved in, and Shanna Brown smiled. She’d been watching for her, waiting to speak to her. Alistair saw Samson Sa scowling in the background.
The sound, which had been muted for the rest of the video, became louder, the two women’s voices picked out of the background noise by a clever engineer.
“I’ve been admiring your mod all night,” Brown said. “Did Samson do it for you?”
The woman leered.
Alistair stepped back, startled. Such a leer should—would—never have come from a face like that. Moreover, he recognized it.
“Tamati Woden. That’s impossible.” Ice crept up his back, his fingers, his toes. “He’s too tall to be modded like that.”
On-screen, the two women moved close; then Shanna Brown gasped, clutched her stomach. The other woman pushed closer, turned her arm.
“Hasn’t got the strength he was expecting to have,” Alistair said. Tamati Woden committed his murders with one thrust, not a thrust, a turn, and another thrust. He—or she—had thought it would take one thrust. Not familiar with that body, then.
Another leer, and the stranger turned away.
Shanna Brown stood for a moment longer, face bloodless with shock, clutching at her stomach, then crumpled to a heap on the floor.
The beautiful stranger made her way casually out of the room as screams started. She stopped at the front door for a final leer at the camera.
Paola turned the video off. “The knife wound alone wouldn’t have killed her.”
“Poison?” Alistair knew how Woden worked. He’d spent three years chasing the man.
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